On May 13, 1889 seven men met in the
City Hall office of Mayor Orestes Cleveland to organize the first free public
library for Jersey City. These newly appointed library trustees chose as
their president the man who had battled for years to convince both the public
and the political officials that a municipal library was a necessity. He
was Dr. Leonard Gordon, a physician, whose first major task was to file a suit
to force the city's Finance Board to appropriate the funds mandated by state
law.

With 15,515 books in stock and with
no fanfare, the new library opened on July 6, 1891 in rented, gas lit rooms in
two adjacent bank buildings on Washington Street near York. To go from one
part of the library to the other, the public had to go out into the street.
Cleary, a new structure was needed, one designed to house a large book
collection and to provide seating capacity for a city with a population reaching
the 200,000 mark.

Throughout the 1890s the trustees
and library staff acquired land at Jersey Avenue and Montgomery Street, hired a
supervising architect, Professor A.D.F. Hamlin of Colombia University, and
announced a design competition. The architectural firm of Brite and Bacon
of New York was selected, contracts were awarded, and, on August 16, 1899, the
cornerstone was set in place. On January 14, 1901 the new building,
today's main library, was dedicated.

As Jersey City grew, so grew the
library system. The Hudson City branch opened in 1911 in rooms on the
second floor of 337 Central Avenue. Its success, with over one hundred
thousand books circulated in the first year, demonstrated the need for
additional branches. The Bergen branch (now the Miller Branch) opened on
Jackson Avenue in 1915 and Greenville branch on Danforth Avenue the following
year. Like the main library, the inadequacy of these rented quarters was
soon apparent and, starting in 1917 with the Zabriskie Street library (now the
Heights branch), new branch buildings were constructed.

Physical expansion continued into
the 1920s, and the main library itself was enlarged. The Depression,
however, took its toll by curtailing any additional growth. It was not
until 1962 that the library added a new building located at Five Corners.

The library added services
throughout the next few decades. Biblioteca Criolla, a Spanish language
library, opened in 1972. Storefront branches were added throughout the
city. Media services were expanded and video rentals introduced.
Additional programming, access to online databases, and the use of microforms,
maps, and photographs have augmented the book and periodical collections.
In 1989 the library embarked on its second century as a significant Jersey City
institution.

In recent years, the most important
development in the library has been the introduction of automation. With
the introduction of an online catalog, patrons can now search the collection
from their homes as well as from a growing number of onsite computer terminals.